![]() Despite the fact nobody knows if it's accurate, the figure has been codified: Limbaugh attracts 20 million listeners each week. Over here, the Radio Show, reaching 20 million listeners a week on 616 stations.”Īnd the month after that, conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote that Limbaugh “is heard on more than 600 mostly AM radio stations with an audience estimated at 20 million listeners per week, is a phenomenon unseen in modern times.”Ī check of Nexis today finds more than 800 news references to that mythical Limbaugh number throughout the years. News & World Report announced: “Welcome, one and all, to Rush World, the one-man media theme park of the '90s. The following month, in August 1993, U.S. ![]() Was there any way to confirm that? Not really, but no matter: The media loved the nice round number, and soon it began to appear everywhere - but often without the acknowledgement that the stat came from Limbaugh's camp. The first reported reference I could find came from the July 31, 1993, issue of the radio bible, Billboard magazine, which reported “Li mbaugh's show is now heard on 610 stations and reaches approximately 20 million listeners, according to Carson,” Limbaugh's “chief of staff.”Īccording to Limbaugh's right-hand person, the talker had 20 million listeners. ![]() It's a statistic that has become absolutely synonymous with Limbaugh.īut where did that ginormous number come from? From Limbaugh, of course. Yet, for years, news consumers have been told 20 million people listen each week. As Farhi noted, nobody has specific numbers about what the talker's audience is and “Limbaugh himself has muddied the water with the claim that he reaches 20 million people a week, although there's no independent support for that figure.” Kurtz's sloppy reporting highlighted the media's perpetual soft spot for Limbaugh's ratings. But doubled? There's simply no proof, regardless of what the Post claimed on Friday. Have Limbaugh's numbers spiked in recent weeks? I'd be shocked if they hadn't given the extraordinary publicity he's received. During his Monday broadcast, Limbaugh reiterated that he had no idea if his ratings had recently increased twofold. Yet the Post on Fridayclaimed Limbaugh's ratings had nearly doubled since January. Limbaugh hadn't seen ratings more recent than January. All I can tell you is that as of January, we booked 80 percent of all our 2008 revenue and we'll be over 2008 by the end of this month. There are d aily ratings taken now in about the top 15 markets but I have not seen them yet. The latest numbers I have are for January, well before this kerfuffle began, and they are through the roof - six shares in NY, for example. The same day Kurtz's article appeared, Byron York at The Washington Examiner asked the turbo talker about his ratings. Plus, even Limbaugh himself didn't think his ratings had doubled in recent weeks. ![]() (A point I made the day the Post published Kurtz's piece.) In fact, on Saturday we found out the thin sourcing that Kurtz used for his claim was little more than a hunch, and the person who made the hunch didn't think the guesstimate of Limbaugh's size growth was scientific or that it represented a true ratings estimate. It was a pro-Limbaugh proclamation that went off like a firecracker, especially online, as conservatives cheered the news and mocked Democrats for padding Limbaugh's audience.īut was it true? Reading Farhi's detailed ratings piece on Saturday, it was hard to see how Kurtz's claim of Limbaugh's audience doubling could withstand serious scrutiny. The article detailed how there aren't any hard ratings numbers within the radio industry regarding Limbaugh's audience size - a topic of increased interest since the AM talker had emerged as the public face of the Republican Party under the Obama administration.įarhi helped put the ratings question issue in proper context, but the unspoken point of the piece seemed to be to walk back the previous day's Post article by Howard Kurtz, which boldly announced in the very first sentence that Limbaugh's ratings had “nearly doubled” since the recent controversy with Obama began in January. ![]() Farhi stressed that trying to determine the total number of weekly listeners represented an exercise “in guesswork, slippery methodology and suspect data.” It ran Saturday in the form of a Paul Farhi article about the dubious nature of trying to measure the size of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience. Call it The Washington Post's 766-word non-correction correction. ![]()
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